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Thursday, May 23, 2013

A Man and his Donkey

Yesterday afternoon in Cartagena, i felt like taking a break from my walking, so i sat down at an outdoor cafe to have a cigar and coffee. A guy that had stopped me on the street to sell me jewelry earlier wandered over and i said he could sit down. (At this point he understood that i would not be a customer.) His english was very good and we chatted for about an hour about various things.

The conversation started off normally enough: he told me about his 4 children, his job, his enduring love of the Toronto Blue Jays, etc. Then he told me a story about how when he was 16 he left the farm he lived on and came to Cartagena for the summer to work renting jetskis to tourists and it was while doing this at 16 that he had sex with a 35 year old woman visiting from Boston. I asked him if it had been his 'first time' and he hesitated and then told me that it was his first time with a woman but that in the area he is from (rural farmland), boys and young men always have their first sexual experiences with donkeys.

Now, this only surprised me in part. I knew this was a 'thing' in rural Colombia as i had recently heard on a podcast about a documentary that had recently been made about this practice; what surprised me was that he was so open about it. He even called over another guy from his area who confirmed this without being prompted. He was quite happy to talk about it and answer any questions i had - and i had lots. How many? How often? Why? How? Do you have favorites? Do you get kicked? What do the women think about this? etc. I won't go into detail about his answers, except to say that, according to this guy, it is a normal thing in certain areas, and while donkeys and young horses are fine, muels are preferred due to their...virginity. Seriously.

It was a very interesting conversation, but one that i will not detail any further, lest i begin attracting the wrong sort of traffic to my blog.